


In the Shallows

by PrinceDarcy



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: After Hannibal's incarcerated, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Aromantic Character, F/M, How Do I Tag, Marriage, Mild Domestic Violence, Minor Character Death, No really very minor, One slap, Past Character Death, Relationship Problems, Unhappy Ending, failing marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-07 06:49:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1888998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrinceDarcy/pseuds/PrinceDarcy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Graham.</p><p>Or: How Will and Alana's relationship comes crashing down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Shallows

**Author's Note:**

> Soundtrack on 8tracks here: http://8tracks.com/direstag/is-there-anything-i-can-do

The crying started about two weeks after their honeymoon. Will felt it wasn't even exactly accurate to call it a honeymoon; they'd taken a weekend and driven out to a dreary grey beach and stayed in a bed and breakfast with walls too thin for him and Alana to even properly consummate their marriage without alerting the elderly couple in the next room over. He'd been at a crime scene at four in the morning barely three days after his wedding. They hadn't minded at the time, or Alana hadn't said anything.

Then Will came home one night to Alana crying with her head in her hands in the kitchen. She quickly forced a smile and wiped her eyes. She'd been thinking about how it was going to be her brother Sydney's birthday soon, how she missed him. Will knew of how Alana's youngest brother had killed himself at eighteen and didn't press the issue. He sat by her and put her arms around her and kissed the back of her head because that was what a husband did, and Alana recycled that explanation the next three times Will found her crying until her late brother's birthday had passed and she stopped explaining herself.

There were times it didn't happen often, where Will felt like maybe they were actually happy together. Their first anniversary came around and he took Alana out for dinner at a restaurant he knew she'd wanted to try since they'd first been together. He'd never done anything for anniversaries when they were dating, and it never seemed like it bothered her much, but it made her so happy that he did it this time around and everything felt so normal, so much like marriages were “meant” to. He tried to keep it in mind as long as he could, buy her flowers every once in a while, surprise her with dinner and movie tickets sometimes. It didn't feel natural to him but Alana seemed a little brighter, kissed him goodbye in the mornings again. He had missed the action itself far less than what it meant.

Then another anniversary came along and he visited Hannibal Lecter. Will could never rationalize, really, why he went. He had nothing to gain, no reason to make the drive to Baltimore every year and face Chilton's prodding to which he had no answer. He did anyway, and he spent ten tense minutes making small talk through bulletproof glass with three guards standing within six feet. Ten minutes were all he was allowed, and small talk was all he was going to have without giving someone at the FBI reason to dust off the reserved prison cell they'd likely been saving for him for years.

Alana didn't come out of the bathroom for two hours that night. Will could tell she thought he couldn't hear her crying over the running water, but he could and it struck him as he sat by the door and contemplated the possibility of feeling guilty for something he'd been doing for four solid years without complaint. She finally came out with damp hair and damp cheeks and Will had just managed to make it look like he was walking down the hall instead of waiting for her. She was surprisingly genial between bites of loin at dinner, but Will caught an emptiness to her laughter and a slight hoarseness to her voice that crept in just a little too often.

He wrapped her arms around her as he slipped into bed at night and pressed his nose into her hair.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No, there isn't.”

A year to that day they had a two month old daughter, and Will wrote Lecter a letter instead of visiting. Charlotte Abigail Graham, quickly dubbed Lotte, was a joy to her mother and father both and for a while their marriage molded itself into good shape around her. Alana's pregnancy had been tough on her, but Lotte was so easy to manage as a baby that it soon made up for the troubles there had been bringing her into the world. She was happy, rarely cried (except for at night when her mother and father were sleeping) and captivated her parents' attention. Will, he found, felt more at home as a father than just as a husband and maybe that was what made things feel so much smoother. Less of his mind had to go towards deciding what gestures Alana would appreciate and more of their focus lay on raising their little girl, happiness coming from things like her first words and wobbly baby steps, from finally being able to get rid of the diapers for good, from the simple joys like watching her discover that her daddy's old dogs still wagged their tails when they got hugs.

Lotte was about three when bumps in the road started cropping up more and more frequently, jarring the chassis of their relationship, of the unit that was _Will and Alana Graham_ more violently. It was difficult to put a name to what started it, exactly, but things had been a little rocky in general for a while when Lotte and Alana both came down with a flu. It wasn't serious, thank whatever higher power may or may not exist, though Will, luckily spared from any apparent symptoms, was still delegated to nurse as “his girls” recovered.

And then he got a call from Kade Prurnell that he was needed in Minnesota for a case. Bad, bad business. Nine kids under ten turning up in pieces. He'd be gone for at least three weeks.

He went.

He called as often as he could from his hotel room, talked to Alana for as long as she felt up to it and apologized profusely for leaving while she was sick. She sounded a bit weary from illness but generally content over the phone, said one of her brothers had come to stay for a few days while she got the last of her strength back. Her brother had a dog that was getting on well with the others. Will expected that he'd come home to a bit of tension if anything and that things would go back to how they were. Lotte certainly didn't seem too perturbed, though she stuck close to him for a few days and kept telling him how much she missed him while he was working. He assured her he wouldn't be gone like that again for a long time and that he loved her. That was all a three year old needed.

But Alana started crying again after that. Will apologized to her time and time again, and she insisted it was nothing, but he'd hear her softly weeping behind the door of the bathroom or find her with a bottle of beer and puffy eyes time and time again.

Every time, the same exchange.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No, there isn't.”

He got his teaching position back the week after Hannibal Lecter escaped from custody. He was glad for it, relishing in routine he'd once resented. He still consulted, more often, even— he was in Quantico every day, anyway. It didn't take long to go down to the morgue and chat a bit with the people working various cases that needed a seasoned pair of eyes. He began making and rekindling friendships with his coworkers and even former students, feeling compelled to show something positive was coming out of his return to the academy. Lotte had started preschool and things seemed to be finally getting better again. It didn't take long for Will to realize that that impression came mostly from how little time he'd been, comparatively, spending with his family. He and Alana weren't often home at the same times anymore, except on weekends and the rare day off, and things were more and more noticeably tense when they were. He tried to compensate by making a point of refusing the next time he was asked to go out of town, but even to him it felt more like a bid for good favor than anything legitimate.

February flowed into March into April and Will had forgotten their anniversary. He took Alana out a week later and they didn't say anything about it, just treated it like a night out while their daughter spent the evening with a babysitter, but he could feel Alana's disappointment. She felt distant even when Lotte had gone to sleep and they had sex for the first time in months; it did little to distract from the physicality of it for Will, but it was a presence in his mind if not in his body. She didn't look him in the eye until they were lying side by side, tired and sated.

“Do you love me, Will?” Alana murmured, pushing his curls out of his face.

“What do you mean?” was not at all what Will had meant to say, but it was perhaps the most honest thing he could have. She'd never questioned it and he never had either. He cared about her more than anyone else, save his daughter, and was attracted to her, and that seemed to fit the definition of love as he understood it. But Alana, instead of clarifying, turned her back and didn't say a word.

They slept facing away from each other that night.

There was a letter in his mailbox a few weeks later, bearing his name in handwriting he would have recognized in an instant. He desperately wanted to open it, know what was inside, but common sense was just enough to make him shove it in his laptop bag to forget about instead. He never actually forgot, as much as he tried to, because forgetting it would mean forgetting Hannibal Lecter, but Will resisted the temptation to open it time after time after time.

Then one day after a brief look over a body in the morgue, he took another agent's bag instead of his own. By the time he realized his mistake, the agent had opened the letter and turned it over to Prurnell and Will was in handcuffs.

The letter contained nothing of consequence, not even anything concretely identifying it as being penned by Lecter other than the handwriting, and the agent who had unwittingly taken Will's bag admitted that it was unopened when he found it. These were lucky turns of events, even though Prurnell tried to make a case of Will having not known the letter wasn't Lecter revealing his location or plans for further murders or anything of the sort. They couldn't prove anything in the end and that was the difference between him facing criminal trial and the reality of what occurred; thirty days in that special reserved jail cell. He knew Prurnell wanted him to get worse, but she didn't call all the shots, and that was the only other bit of luck involved.

Alana slapped him when he got home, hard enough to leave a mark. Lotte burst into tears and so did she, and Will did nothing but turn his head to give her the chance to hit the other side if she wanted to. They hadn't visited him in prison, and he hadn't expected them to.

The second blow didn't come. Alana cried against his chest for what seemed like an eternity as their daughter cried and cried in fear and sadness and lack of understanding of what happened. It took Will another eternity to find his voice, as if there was something he could say that would make everything alright.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No, there isn't.”

Alana left with Lotte that night, and though she said she just needed a break, Will knew she wasn't coming back. He packed up their things and mailed them to Alana's mother on intuition.

A few days later there was another letter in his mailbox.


End file.
